The materials and phrase are both easily taken in in their entirety during a quick drive-by: "#BLACK LIVES" at rough eye level with "MATTERS" just below, all of it in pink, red, mustard, orange, blue and green knit (some shag carpet-like pile?) laid out on an area about the size of two tightly parked vans. The letters on Wilshire are part of Urban Letters, an ongoing project of YBLA's where epigrammatic or gnomic texts "that might otherwise remain unsaid" are solicited online in order to be made softly manifest IRL. It also reflects an ongoing and instructive engagement between ad hoc collaborative YBLA and the more properly institutional Craft & Folk Art Museum (CFAM). YBLA's monthly meetings are held at CFAM and the same gray fence that now recalls the value of Black lives was the site of several months of Urban Letters interventions in 2013, among them "LACK OF PASSION IS FATAL," a useful corollary to the current assertion if there ever was one.

CAFAM was also the site of YBLA's most explicitly monumental work to date, "Granny Squared," wherein several thousand crowdsourced crocheted squares were applied to the museum's multistory front facade. (It's worth noting that that grey fence was site of a hashtag in 2013 as well, the more traditionally marketing minded #GRANNYSQUARED.) Janet Owen Driggs aptly described "Granny Squared" in an Artbound review as "bold, jolly" yet also, well, crafty, its ambitions extending beyond CAFAM to the other museum across the street. "Operating as caricatures for the 20th century's tussle between "old" and 'new,'" Owen Driggs wrote, "CAFAM and LACMA signpost an abundance of related binaries, which history and culture tell us are mutually exclusive, with one having less value than the other in each pair: domestic and public, female and male, body and mind, fiction and truth, vernacular and formal, low and high, and of course -- even without taking the functions of the buildings into consideration -- craft and art."

YBLA's "#BLACK LIVES MATTER" (spaces included) also has ambitions about binaries and value and function that extend beyond CAFAM's physical location. Like the hashtag-slash-movement to which it owes the phraseology, the piece at 5814 Wilshire is working language, a kind of materialized tag that YBLA and CAFAM have embedded on the museum's physical plant. This tag opens CAFAM up to another conversation even as it takes us away from the museum, leads us somewhere else.

By Black History Month 2015, almost everyone knows the "somewhere else" associated with "Black lives matter:" Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin. The weekly parade of police-co-produced snuff video, hashtag black lives matter, hashtag yet another American city, hashtag another dead Black name, hopefully not yours. The phrase has entered what passes for a commons in this country (Facebook) even as it remains contested offline, attaining a kind of fraught ubiquity where it is easily unmoored from its foundational specificities, its historical points of origin.

In "A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement," Black queer activist Alicia Garza is very direct about the phrase's specificity and point of origin: "I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters," Garza writes, "as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed."

Garza goes on:

"It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement."

Whereas a previous Urban Letters aphorism asserted "ITS JUST ART," it's work now aspires to assert the opposite.

]]>
Mindful of the unique erasures Garza cites her piece (and perhaps mindful of Printed Matters' recent missteps, YBLA and CAFAM have organized an event with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles on February 22. Dubbed a "pop-up" the event, will feature food, political organizing, music, and, of course, the kind of collaborative, engaged making that are YBLA and CAFAM's hallmarks: live storytelling, silk screening, a group mural project, all the tiny human interactions needed to support and extend each.

The upcoming event illustrates the kinds of distinct intelligence that organizations run, and staffed, by women can bring to bring to bear. The event is also as much an aesthetic intervention as a political one. Like most of YBLA's work, "#BLACK LIVES MATTER" is vibrant, colorful, and whimsical. But, depending on the time of day, the foot traffic on Wilshire, it can scan as lonely in ways that much of their work resolutely does not. Driving past at least once a week over the last two months, often at night, I've not been able to help starting a little at it as if catching sight of a roadside memorial out of the corner of my eye. I wonder who died here, I thought, before remembering. It will be good to see it again on Sunday under conditions that better align with the way it was made: surrounded by people and life.

"As a part of the Yarn Bombing Los Angeles (YBLA) Urban Letters project. CAFAM, YBLA, Black Lives Matter - Los Angeles (BLMLA), and World City Center (WCC) have come together to produce a BLM Pop Up to celebrate Black Futures Month on February 22, 2015 from 12:00pm-5:00pm."

Futher Reading on Yarn Bombing Los Angeles from Artbound:

Unraveling the CAFAM Yarn Bomb
The Craft and Folk Art Museum has been covered in 15,000 handmade "granny squares" by Yarn Bombing Los Angeles and square-makers from the U.S. and abroad.

Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

]]>
Place of Disco: The Republic of Discostantag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.785612014-12-22T19:40:00Z2015-02-28T02:23:20ZThe Discostan collective, hosted at Footsie's Bar in Los Angeles, is a celebration of musical traditions and cross-cultural sounds from Beirut to Bangkok via Bombay.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=23

In partnership with The Los Angeles/Islam Arts InitiativeThe Los Angeles/Islam Arts Initiative brings together nearly 30 cultural institutions throughout Los Angeles to tell various stories of traditional and contemporary art from multiple Islamic regions and their significant global diasporas.

On the second Wednesday of every month, Footsie's bar in Cypress Park becomes the capital of a temporary, sonic ummah named Discostan.

Footsies is an unlikely locale for such a thing by most measures. Perched on the southern lip of an overwhelmingly Latino neighborhood, the bar has long been a fixture of Los Angeles' dive-&-DJ scene, the changing circumstances of its ownership making it a sibling at various times to venues like Monty's, The Short Stop, La Cita, El Chavito and others.

Like any Los Angeles location worth its salt, Footsies has stood in on screen for itself and other places, some part of the bar appearing in "Bad Santa," "Parenthood," a Rhianna video, two episodes of "Southland." But on nights that Discostan is in session the bar embodies a Los Angeles unlike most found on screens large or small. Laying claim to a notional territory that stretches "from Beirut to Bangkok via Bombay," the Discostan collective -- founder Arshia Fatima Haq, DJs David Gomez, Jeremy Loudenback and Kirk Gee, former member Sasha Ali -- called dancers and audiophiles into semi-regular community there as they have regularly since 2012, Discostan appearing and disappearing "Brigadoon"-like first in Koreatown and then at its current home.

Discostan is a party but its form and function varies depending on who you ask, or, perhaps more accurately, who you are. Haq's sense of what Discostan is (or could) be spans the southern and brown portion of the globe. Calling herself currently obsessed with the field recording of Aisha Ali ("She was a pioneer musicologist, she traveled through Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, you name it, in the 1970s."), she also cites "Middle Eastern double reed madness -- it's the music I want to get married to, give birth to, and I hope they play it at my funeral as well," and speaks audio story-telling where sets pan-Muslim sets build with "prologue, climax and denouement" around themes such as hauntings, heartbreaks and psychedelic Islamic States.

Discostan is both a geography and a condition entered into by the ceremony of dance, hence the "disco."

"I like melodies and rhythms that are pushing the edge of collapse," says Haq, "and I think the element of repetition that you see/hear in trance ceremonies and music is really key to reaching a particular state. I love unexpected rhythms and the dark lines underlying contemporary dabke, choubi and right now I am really into the rhythms of qataghani from Afghanistan. I also love watching the qawliya dance from Iraq. The best ones involve daggers and lots of hair. Sometimes I get the hair thing down but I'm nowhere near able to do this dance."

On the Discostan's actual ground in Footsies, art, politics, connoisseurship, dive-bar flirtation, psychedelia, the liminal pleasure of being pulled off a stool by a novel or familiar sound, are in play on any given second Wednesday. More officially, the monthly event has also been an anchor participant in the Los Angeles / Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI), operating as a kind of pop-up clubhouse for the artists, curators, and fellow travelers who came together this fall to, as the LA/IAI put it, "tell various stories of traditional and contemporary art from multiple Islamic regions and their significant global diasporas."

Since September, Discostan's night has framed a running series of LA/IAI performances: guest DJ sets by Yavaran aka Kamyar Jarahzadeh of Ajam Media Collective and crate-digger/curator Arash Saedinia, dance performances by Qabila Folk Dance Company and Burqa Girls, musical performance by Amit Kotecha and Vinay Sharma, as well as inspired rendition of the Talking Head's Dream Operator by Gelare Khoshgozaran, where David's Byrne "dream" was recast as a drone:

And every drone tells it all

And this is your story

You droned me a heart

You're the drone operator

In keeping with the heterodox notion of an Islamic L.A., this profusion of sound and movement doesn't sum up as much as it complicates. Asked how she came to found Discostan, Haq (an Indian American filmmaker who also DJ's Discostan's Radio Sombra and dublab streams) begins with a complication, wondering whether the notion of a generalized "Islamic" art is a function of art world colonialism even as she shares that her party grew from her own desire to revive her own connection what she calls a larger "Islamic" cultural sphere.

"Discostan formed organically," Haq recalls, "it was a way to reconnect on my own terms to a cultural and religious heritage I had inadvertently become exiled from, through emigration, displacement, generational differences, etc. From this very personal place I became more and more engaged in discovering the popular and raw music from the larger Islamic world, the stuff that wouldn't necessarily get studio produced on an international level but that people in these places actually listen to."

For Discostan, the question of what people actually listen is often a function of a memory, family, and translation. When Haq closes her eyes and thinks of her own auditory genealogy, she hears a 1971 song by Kishore Kumar, the don of Bollywood playback singers. "I'm six years old and sitting on the armrest between my parents in my dad's Oldsmobile, and this is on the 8-track machine.

The chorus translates to: "Life is a beautiful journey, who knows what will happen tomorrow? (The poetry is utterly lost in my 5-second translation.)"

Similarly, her road to "disco" (half of her -stan) comes through the familial frame as well. "I was around 4 when I started learning Arabic to read the Quran," Haq says, "and I was already exposed to Bollywood all the time at home. We weren't supposed to imagine what Allah looked like but as a kid your imagination is paramount. So in my mind, Allah was an Arab man wearing a keffiyeh in a black void but with disco lights around him. I suppose that was my first idea of disco. True story."

It goes without saying that this vision is an implicitly political one. That implicit politics became explicit in October when Discostan organized a fundraiser at the Echoplex for the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. "There were so many venues that wouldn't host us," recalls Haq, "because they thought supporting the Palestinians in any way was too political. Imagine, raising funds for children whose limbs are being blown off by American dollars is too political! Thinking about it was keeping me up at night. The news and the deliberate whitewashing of it all it was beyond disturbing and we couldn't just go on celebrating and playing the music of all these places and not acknowledge what is happening there right now. We are really grateful to Liz Garo and the Echo for giving us the opportunity and space to give voice to these issues."

"There is this monolothic definition of Islam being propagated right now," says Haq, "and it's a reduction and simplification with a political function." Ultimately, her Discostan exists to counter that definition. "There are multiple manifestations and definitions of Islam, historically there have always been, and we have to fight to keep these other traditions from being suffocated and stifled and silenced."

Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

]]>
KCET Community Advisory Board Surveytag:www.kcet.org,2014:/about//577.683812014-01-04T01:23:44Z2014-01-22T18:31:53ZThe Community Advisory Board (CAB) would like to hear from various communities the station serves. Share your thoughts and opinions on how KCET is doing!Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=577&id=23
"Thank you for participating in this survey. The Community Advisory Board (CAB) would like to hear from various communities the station serves. Our current members represent a diverse range of issues and constituencies. Gathering the feedback and opinions from community members like you through this survey is one of many ways that KCET is conducting outreach.

Once completing the survey, you will also be entered to win a pair of passes to KCET's 2014 Spring Cinema Series at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in North Hollywood! The pass includes 8 exclusive screenings from March 4 - April 22 of new and exciting films prior to their local release. Following each screening, enjoy a special Q&A segment with the cast and crew of the film. The Cinema Series is hosted by nationally recognized film expert Pete Hammond. For more information, visit [ http://www.kcet.org/arts/cinema_series/ ]http://www.kcet.org/arts/cinema_series/

We thank you for your time and your thoughtfulness.

Note: If the survey does not appear below, it be accessed here: Take the survey.

]]>
An AfroFuturism Film Festival tag:www.kcet.org,2013:/events//38.569722013-02-28T20:53:12Z2013-02-28T21:18:08ZA weekly screening of great AfroFuturism film and video. Up next: Sun Ra and Space is the Place.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=38&id=23Abducted by aliens, forced into slavery, secreted to a strange land and forced to participate in bizarre genetic experiments - the latest science fiction blockbuster, or a page from Black history?

Artist Sanford Biggers has called afrofuturism "a way of re-contextualizing and assessing history and imagining the future of the African Diaspora via science, science fiction, technology, sound, architecture, the visual and culinary arts and other more nimble and interpretive modes of research and understanding." Over the next few weeks, KCET Director of New Media Gary Dauphin will be introducing then showing a few of his favorite AfroFuturistic and AfroSurrealistic films, followed by discussion with a few guest stars, at the Inglewood Public Library, Main Branch.

]]>
WISE Connections: A Village Movement Backgroundertag:www.kcet.org,2012:/shows/yourturntocare//1772.428662012-02-29T15:00:00Z2013-12-02T17:47:57ZCEO of Wise Connections, Grace Cheng Braun, explains how this unique organization provides services to the elderly living on their own.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1772&id=23
The Village Movement is a grassroots organization that builds a community of support around a senior so that they can remain in their own homes. CEO of WISE Connections Grace Cheng Braun explains how this unique organization provides services to the elderly living on their own, particularly where family members or partners can no longer help. For a yearly membership fee, these seniors have access to service providers that will assist them with daily living responsibilities, from driving to a doctor's appointment to grocery shopping to caring for their residence when they are away. With one phone call, village members have every need and concern taken care of, making life on their own comfortable, enjoyable and safe.
]]>
Iconic Angelenos in Black History: Ben Caldwelltag:www.kcet.org,2012:/socal/departures/landofsunshine//1488.427282012-02-20T00:44:00Z2013-11-20T06:04:05ZToday we celebrate media artist and filmmaker Ben Caldwell for the "Iconic Angelenos in Black History" series.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1488&id=23
In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Ben Caldwell:

It must take a mighty thick skin to build a community-based, education-focused media center just a (metaphoric) stone's throw from the sound stages of Hollywood. Such work calls for the intestinal fortitude to ignore the smart money's dismissal of your quaint devotion to collective work, as well as a willingness to forgive students whose progress will ultimately be measured by their ability to take what they've been taught and run with it... as far away from you as their feet, talents and a few more lucky breaks can take them.

Or, it takes a certain kind of love to build said media center. Educator and documentary filmmaker Ben Caldwell has long been an exemplar of that sort of stubborn, revolutionary love, a form of devotion for which there are many, many historical precedents but increasingly fewer living avatars. Caldwell's love is not just a love of black people although it is in the black art enclave of Los Angeles that his reputation would be made.

Born in New Mexico in 1945, Caldwell remembers assisting his grandfather in his work as a projectionist in a small town movie theater, his earliest memories a kind of colored Cinema Paradiso where an attenuated Hollywood apprenticeship and the patent oddities of being a black child in splendid desert isolation combined to work a curious alchemical magic on him. Caldwell would grow up to be an iconic citizen of black Los Angeles, but first he had to come here, attend UCLA, fall in with the wrong early '70s crowd (Caldwell and his cohort's adventures in black filmmaking were recently the subject of the UCLA Film Archives' L.A. Rebellion series ), and make a life for himself. That life would encompass a series of documentaries and experimental narrative films, as well as founding the KAOS Network community art center, which has not only produced entire generations of South L.A. trained filmmakers, technicians, web designers, artists, and animators, but a whole slew of MC's through its Project Blowed open-mic night. Looking at his accomplishments, it is possible to forget that Caldwell was in some ways a convert to black Los Angeles, but this often the way of such lives: it often takes a convert's zeal to show us how it's done.

Caldwell's love of film was honed helping his grandfather as a projectionist in New Mexico.

Founded KAOS Network in 1984 in Leimert Park. KAOS teaches local youth video production, web design, filmmaking and other technical skills, and is the only such organization in South Los Angeles.

KAOS is home to Project Blowed, a weekly open-mic workshop that groomed acts such Aceyalone, Medusa, Busdriver, Freestyle Fellowship and Jurassic Five.

Caldwell's films often deal with history and culture, starting with his UCLA thesis project Medea (1973), which looked at how black children absorb history, to the more recent La Buena Vida (The Good Life) (2008), which documents a series of encounters between L.A. rappers and a group in Havana, Cuba.

As we continue celebrating Black History Month with daily portraits of iconic Angelenos, check back for more features on other pioneering individuals and make sure to share this history with your friends and family. Click here for more portraits.

]]>
Iconic Angelenos in Black History: Paul Williamstag:www.kcet.org,2012:/socal/departures/landofsunshine//1488.427202012-02-19T01:00:00Z2013-11-20T06:04:44ZToday we review the life of architect Paul Williams for the "Iconic Angelenos in Black History" series.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1488&id=23
In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Paul Williams:

Black Los Angeles may have a distinct, instantly recognizable architecture, but it has no master builder. Close your eyes and think of the architecture of black L.A. and what you'll most likely see is an afterimage of recent 'hood flick mise-en-scène: collectively art-directed expanses of flat road, heat radiating from concrete and asphalt, craftsman houses reduced to pill box repetition, blank blue sky stabbed by a single palm tree. This overwriting of black L.A. by Hollywood takes on another layer of complexity when you consider that Los Angeles does indeed have a singular black architect, a man responsible for over 2000 private homes, so many of them designed for the bold faced names of the local dream factory that this man was once known as "The Architect to the Stars."

Born in Los Angeles in 1894, Paul Revere Williams lived a story that could have made any screenwriter proud had it been visual fiction. His father died when he was two, his mother when he was four. The only black child at his elementary school, he was urged away from his first love - architecture (Williams knew from the very first what he was meant to be) - on the well-intentioned (but deeply racist) logic that there would never be enough demand for his services among local Negroes. He persisted, studying at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design in what was then Westlake Park, before going on to USC's School of Engineering. (It was during this period Williams purportedly taught himself to render drawings upside down so that he could sit far across from clients who might not want to sit right next to a black man.) He married relatively young (why waste precious time looking for what he already had?) and, that done, became the first certified African American architect west of the Mississippi in 1921. He also became the first black member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1923.

He designed enough iconic Los Angeles buildings, to well, fill a city: the MCA Building, the Ambassador Hotel (renovations), the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (renovations), contributions to the design of the "Theme" building at LAX, Hollywood palaces for Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Lon Chaney, Sr., Tyrone Power, Danny Thomas, Barbara Stanwyck, and a host of other once-bright, but now faded stars. Away from the bright lights he also contributed to buildings across the country, working as an architect for the Navy (notch another name for the "military as race-neutral meritocracy" meme) and the U.S. government, for whom he helped design the first federally-funded public housing projects, Langston Terrace in Washington, D.C. and Pueblo del Rio in Los Angeles.

Stone, of course, has a tendency to outlive the soft meat of both architect and the client, and so it is that the world in which Williams achieved these unlikely things largely no longer exists. This is not just a matter of outliving racism, but of also outliving segregation's parallel world of black glory and glamour. He lived and designed homes for many black notables in West Adams, back when it was the seat of Los Angeles' colored society. He married at the First AME Church in Los Angeles and his wife, Della Mae Givens, founded the Wilfandel Club, the oldest African American social and philanthropic club in Los Angeles. Harvard apparently did not come calling, but Howard, Lincoln and Tuskeegee all awarded him honorary doctorates, while Joseph Cox's Great Black Men of Masonry records that Williams achieved the Thirty-Third Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Prince Hall Affiliation. There is today, among a certain cadre of bourgie black folks, a fad for the ownership of a Paul Williams home. How better to display one's taste and wealth than pluck one of Williams' buildings from relative obscurity, goes the thinking? But how much more exhilarating - how much stranger - it must have been to build it all from scratch.

]]>

In 1923 became the first African American to become a member of the American Institute of Architects

In 1957 became first black elected to the distinguished AIA College of Fellows

In 1961 as a joint venture he designed the LAX Theme Building

Perfected the skill of rendering drawings "upside down" so that his clients (who may have been uncomfortable sitting next to a black architect) could see the drawings rendered right side up across the table from them

In 1963 designed the current location of the First AME Church in Los Angeles (founded in 1872 by Bridget Mason) following a 1972 fire which destroyed the original building

With Hilyard Robinson, he co-designed Langston Terrace, one of the first federally financed public housing projects in the U.S. and located in Washington, D.C., built between 1935 and 1938 by the Public Works Administration.

Notable clients include Frank Sinatra, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lucille Ball and Julie London to name a few.

As we continue celebrating Black History Month with daily portraits of iconic Angelenos, check back for more features on other pioneering individuals and make sure to share this history with your friends and family. Click here for more portraits.

]]>
Iconic Angelenos in Black History: Octavia E. Butlertag:www.kcet.org,2012:/socal/departures/landofsunshine//1488.426832012-02-16T19:50:39Z2014-06-09T20:43:31ZToday we review the life of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler for the "Iconic Angelenos in Black History" series.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1488&id=23
In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Octavia E. Butler:

"I'm a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles," science fiction novelist Octavia Butler once famously quipped, referencing not just a traumatic local childhood - dyslexia and social anxiety had her branded as "slow" while growing up in Pasadena - but how that trauma would mark her life in both expected and unexpected ways. Being born an epically quiet and awkward black girl in post-WWII Los Angeles had made Butler into the sort of bookish, borderline shut-in who would live with an elderly, Baptist mother her entire life. But this origin story had also made her into one of the greatest writers of her generation, a black woman who did not so much reject the notions she had received about race and gender as she meticulously stress-tested them in the laboratory of her fiction.

If a grand theme emerges from Butler's work, it's that relationships between the powerful and powerless turn out to be much, much more complicated than we are often asked to believe them to be. The same applies to the details of Octavia Butler's own life. Born to a shoeshiner who died while she was just an infant, Butler was raised by her mother and grandmother in circumstances that seemed to hover persistently between two black L.A.'s: one hardscrabble and weighed down, one striving and upwardly mobile. The ironies of being black and female in the planet's entertainment capital clearly did not escape the notice of a girl remembered as towering and ungainly (female beauty is a source of both power and vulnerability in Butler's work), Nor did the problem of being black in L.A.'s famously diverse exurbs, the complex hybridity of her fiction likely having some precedent in the ferment of her adolescence in black/white/latino 'hoods.

What material deprivations Butler may have suffered were offset by the wealth of media to which she had access growing up during the dual high watermarks of American pulp and the Californian dream. No biography of Butler is complete without references to the public library system, to the go-go heydays of magazine publishing, replete with legendary brands such as Galaxy and Amazing and Fantasy and Science Fiction, to long afternoons spent hiding in double features and matinees. She wrote her first story at the age of twelve to escape what she described as run-of-the-mill loneliness and boredom and never stopped, throwing herself into the creation of rigorously crafted imaginary worlds, this even as her generational compatriots were working in parallel at reimagining the country at lunch counters, marches and protests.

Butler wrote thirteen novels and many more short stories, and Los Angeles provided a recurring backdrop for her writing. In such stories, black Los Angeles retains its specificity even as it provides the ground on which other, highly speculative edifices will be built - the black church, restive black working and middle classes, and black Hollywood enclaves all make resonant appearances. Butler died at the relatively young age of 58 (young against the backdrop of contemporaries such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Jamaica Kincaid), but as long as there are thoughtful black boys and girls wrestling with how to live in the City of Dreams, she'll be read, reread and remembered.

A 2006 interview with Akasha Gloria Hull for LAPL's Aloud series (originally published here):

]]>

In 1995, received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant, becoming the first science fiction writer to receive the honor

Began writing when she was 10 years old and told friends she embraced science fiction after seeing a B-movie called "Devil Girl from Mars"

In 1979, published Kindred, a novel that uses time travel to explore slavery in the U.S., which became the most popular of all her books, with 250,000 copies currently in print
In 2010, inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame

Diagnosed with dyslexia

Woke up everyday at 2 a.m. for years to write before she went to work

In 2000, received the Lifetime Achievement Award in writing from the PEN American Center

As we continue celebrating Black History Month with daily portraits of iconic Angelenos, check back for more features on other pioneering individuals and make sure to share this history with your friends and family. Click here for more portraits.

]]>
Follow Hurricane Irene on KCETtag:www.kcet.org,2011:/shows/tvtalk//59.365802011-08-26T23:10:34Z2011-08-26T23:36:18ZPlease keep an eye on KCET's Twitter and Facebook accounts for updates about our coverage of Hurricane Irene. Depending on the situation on the East Coast, we may be breaking into our regularly scheduled programming to carry live updates from our news partners.
Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=59&id=23Please keep an eye on KCET's Twitter and Facebook accounts for updates about our coverage of Hurricane Irene. Depending on the situation on the East Coast, we may be breaking into our regularly scheduled programming to carry live updates from our news partners.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear in comments from folks who are either in the Hurricane zone or have heard from friends and relatives there. Additionally, you can follow live updates on Twitter for the #hurricaneirene hashtag below, as well as live webcam from Manhattan being manned by a few friends of station.

]]>
End Times at the L.A. Times?tag:www.kcet.org,2011:/updaily/the_public_note//1476.354122011-07-28T02:05:11Z2011-07-29T19:50:44ZIt's long been a general L.A. media axiom that The Los Angeles Times' best days were behind it, but, as Edward James Olmos tells Harrison Ford at the end of Blade Runner: "It's too bad she won't live... But then again, who does?" Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1476&id=23

It's long been a general L.A. media axiom that The Los Angeles Times' best days were behind it, but, as Edward James Olmos tells Harrison Ford at the end of Blade Runner: "It's too bad she won't live... But then again, who does?" The Times' decline may have been unduly hastened by poor corporate governance (that would be a link to the Wikipedia page for Sam Zell you're hovering over there), but the paper is also just another casualty of the larger structural realignment that is afflicting the profits and readerships of print media worldwide. That layoff bell you hear emanating from Downtown, humble writer/editor/journo/reporter? Wait long enough and it may start tolling for thee.

]]>
The interconnectedness of our fortunes (or at least of our Facebook friends and Google+ circles) may be why the cuts were not even done before initial reports about them began to appear at LA Observed, Fishbowl LA and Publishers Weekly, the personal blog of L.A. Times blog editor summer-vacationer Tony Pierce. Fired books columnist Susan Salter Reynolds weighed in on her own situation via the PW comments, where SGV Valley News Group theater columnist Frances Baum Nicholson joined the consensus lament over the general state of arts and literary coverage in the region:

(Los Angeles may be the "Entertainment Capital of the World," but apparently the strain of this achievement has left us unable to claim "Arts Journalism Capital" as well.)

For those of us in public media, the woes of our commercial cousins (kissing cousins, really; the membrane that separates our demimondes has never been particularly impermeable to individual journalists) provide both a neverending wake-up call and reaffirmation of our mission. It's not a state secret that the basic pitch public media makes to the audience is that it will provide media that the for-profit system either can't or won't. An initiative like KCET's SoCal Connected exists (and, if awards are any tally, thrives) against the backdrop of dismal accountings of local TV news coverage like the Normal Lear's Center's periodic surveys. Similarly, the mere existence our recently announced ARC arts project (funded in part by the L.A. County Arts Commission and involving potential partners such as USC's Annenberg School) implies not-so-subtly that there is important cultural reporting falling through the cracks of existing media. (For the record, the irony of the preceding link to the LAT does not escape me.) Overall, though, public media hasn't the resources, scope or leeway to do all things the thriving commercial press once did, making the loss of talented, seasoned reporters at institutions like the Los Angeles Times an often irrevocable one. We may not be physically living in the dystopia depicted in Ridley Scott's iconic vision of Los Angeles, but media-wise we may already be there.

Here's that Blade Runner clip, btw:

]]>
Download the July KCET Primetime Listings and Highlightstag:www.kcet.org,2011:/shows/tvtalk//59.347222011-06-29T00:02:54Z2011-06-30T18:28:22ZThe July primetime and general schedule .pdfs are now available.
Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=59&id=23Welcome to July on KCET, friends! This is just a friendly reminder that the July primetime and general schedule .pdfs are now available.

Because our broadcast schedule occasionally changes over the course of the month, our online schedules are the most accurate, most up-to-date views of our listings available.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

]]>
Welcome to the KCET.org Community!tag:www.kcet.org,2011:/discussions//581.345832011-06-20T19:16:33Z2011-06-20T19:23:05Z If you've created a KCET.org profile we'd love to hear a bit more about you. Who are you? What brings you here? Tell us in this thread! (Commenters with profile pictures will get an extra hearty hello!)...Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=581&id=23

If you've created a KCET.org profile we'd love to hear a bit more about you. Who are you? What brings you here? Tell us in this thread!

(Commenters with profile pictures will get an extra hearty hello!)

]]>
KCET.org Site Helptag:www.kcet.org,2011:/discussions//581.344152011-06-10T22:45:57Z2012-06-28T01:14:38ZHowdy! My name is Gary Dauphin and I'm KCET's Director of New Media. Do you have a question about KCET.org? Ask it here and I'll do my best to get you the answer. Please note that if you have a...Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=581&id=23
Howdy! My name is Gary Dauphin and I'm KCET's Director of New Media. Do you have a question about KCET.org? Ask it here and I'll do my best to get you the answer.

Please note that if you have a question about your KCET membership, the KCET on-air schedule, or another non-web related matter, I may not be of much assistance. The best resource for those sorts of issues are the good folks in KCET Member and Viewer services, who can be reached at (323) 953-5238 Monday through Friday, between the hours of 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

]]>
Join Reza Aslan's Live Twitter Q&Atag:www.kcet.org,2011:/shows/global_watch_kcet_special//1374.322272011-04-14T06:46:51Z2011-04-14T20:22:09ZJoin KCET and Global Watch host Reza Aslan in real time during KCET's airing of our Global Watch special on Thursday, April 14th at 9:30PM PST. Reza will be answering questions on Twitter about Global Watch and other topics from 9:30PM PST to 10:30PM PST.Gary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1374&id=23Join KCET and Global Watch host Reza Aslan in real time during the airing of the Global Watch special on Thursday, April 14th at 9:30PM PST. This special is your passport to understanding what's happening far beyond our borders and how it directly affects us at home, and Reza will be answering questions on Twitter about the show and other topics from 9:30PM PST to 10:30PM PST.

How to participate:

Watch the premiere of Global Watch on KCET at 9:30 on Thursday April 14th, or, if you're not in KCET's broadcast area, watch a live simulcast of the show here.

Tweet questions and comments to Reza, either by tweeting him directly at @rezaaslan, or by using the #globalwatch hashtag.

That's it!

We'll be posting the best of the conversation here on KCET.org in the coming days.

]]>
About Mexico - One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless tag:www.kcet.org,2011:/shows/mexico_-_one_plate_at_a_time_with_rick_bayless//360.313562011-03-18T22:28:22Z2014-06-20T17:43:47ZLearn more about MEXICO - ONE PLATE AT A TIME WITH RICK BAYLESSGary Dauphinhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=360&id=23
In Mexico - One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless, the beloved chef and restaurateur seamlessly weaves together techniques, recipes, cultural musings and off-the-wall surprises. This season Rick presents start-to-finish, stress-free, Mexican-inspired fiestas packed with creativity, color and flavor. Throughout the series, Rick translates his Mexican travel adventures into unforgettable parties from intimate fireside suppers and casual backyard cocktails with friends to big, boisterous bashes for 25. Rick also suggests clever and practical ideas to make each party special, like creating signature drinks for the occasion, serving ceviche in glass votive holders and transforming supermarket salad bar items into a hip Mexican crudites platter. And to help set the mood, he offers party playlists featuring his favorite musical finds and gardening tips for growing one's own ingredients.
]]>